Mike Mearls "Invented The Baked Potato" in Xanathar's Guide With The Cleric Forge Domain

Making a change from all those lovely pictures of Jeremy Crawford on EN World's front page, this time it's Mike Mearls who speaks to D&D Beyond about the Cleric Forge Domain in Xanathar's Guide, along with some interesting observations about baked potatoes.

Making a change from all those lovely pictures of Jeremy Crawford on EN World's front page, this time it's Mike Mearls who speaks to D&D Beyond about the Cleric Forge Domain in Xanathar's Guide, along with some interesting observations about baked potatoes.


[video=youtube;nZznOH4-njM]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZznOH4-njM[/video]​


"... one of those ones where it's like "Why wasn't this in the Player's Handbook?", right like it's the dwarf clerics have become so iconic to the game and it's funny because they weren't technically really like 2nd Edition let you play a dwarf cleric, but I think that people just naturally always, I don't know what it is about dwarves? Dwarves and clerics just goes together and I think part of it is because you have the story of Moradin forging the dwarves, he literally makes them, right, and I think that's mythically very interesting, this idea that you have a craftsman who's a God who basically challenges himself -- "Can I make a folk, , the dwarves, my children. I'm gonna [something] amount of iron and metal and ingots whatever it is , and that to me is really interesting and I think that would have such profound implications of that society where like your God physically made you out of iron, out of metal and breathed life into you, and so then you have that association of dwarves, of crafting things. Of course creation would be hopefully sacred to dwarves because that's what their deity does, that's what their deity did to create them.

And again this is what I think is interesting in D&D when you have the divine, the divine is knowable. Like Moradin's day to day desires might be unknowable or cryptic but Morden is a person that is like what happened, like people know, there's there's not a question of faith, it's a question of which team do you pick? And so the idea of the dwarf cleric is essentially to my mind when we were working on it, what I was thinking 100% was the dwarf cleric who decides "I am going to emulate Moradin, I want to be a great Smith, that the deity who created me was a great smith and I will follow those footsteps because creation is sacred to our folk".

And then since it's a cleric you have to ask yourself how do you use creation to beat down orcs and goblins? And then it's just like - make magic weapons. That's it, you get to imbue a weapon and make it magical and that just felt very sensible, very obvious; and the great thing is in there our system it's not game breaking; it's powerful but it's not over-the-top.

This is one of the subclasses I think really encapsulates when we're doing things really right the initial playtest feedback was through the roof positive. I think we had to tweak a few things here and there but it hit that note I think of ... I was joking when I said this should have been the Players Handbook but really it should've been in the Players Handbook because it's so iconic. As soon as we showed it to people they were just like "Yes this makes sense. This fits, the mechanics make sense, the mechanics are easy, there's nothing in those mechanics that's tricky or strange or clever. It's just obvious. I make things magical, I make my armor better and make my weapons better. I make things, that's it."

But it just hits such a resonant tone and that's always what we're shooting for we do these new subclasses - we want to hit that resonant tone. You can go for the thing that's very experimental that people haven't seen before, and that's part of the approach, you need to do some of that. But when you're doing things where people just look out and go "Oh yeah that's D&D", yes do you feel really you feeling good about yourself as a designer because I fill the gap that everyone wanted to play but they couldn't play. Maybe they didn't know the gap was empty until you gave them this, and then suddenly everyones playing it.

And I think that's how we are really truly growing the game when we do that, when you could imagine "Oh if you could go back in time and give Xanathar's to the Players Handbook team, this is one of the domains, one of the options, they would just be "Oh, yes, of course let's put this right in the Players Handbook."

That always feels good as a designer when you do that. To me it's it's not the exotic new wacky thing it's the thing that's just like, "You've invented baked potatoes. Now that you've invented it everyone will have these with their steak forever", I just feel like, "Wow, that's kind of cool!"

Because it fits, and that's when we know as designers, as creators, we're connecting with the audience, we're hitting on things that people want, we're hitting on things that just make sense to people, and I love that feeling as a designer on a game like Dungeons & Dragons, that has a history, that has a big active user base, it means we as designers are in touch with players, that work on the same page. I love that feeling."



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Panda-s1

Scruffy and Determined
Other editions had more than three times that.


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Other editions didn't give each domain a set of unique powers. IIRC it's always been some variety of spell list before 5e with maybe some weak feature.


"right like it's the dwarf clerics have become so iconic to the game and it's funny because they weren't technically really like 2nd Edition let you play a dwarf cleric, but I think that people just naturally always, I don't know what it is about dwarves?"

I have no idea what this means. It's not even coherent English.

We've had dwarf cleric as an official PC class since March 1988 and it had nothing to do with Moradin or 2nd edition AD&D.

He's saying dwarf clerics weren't always iconic, and yet people have made them that way since they became an option.
 

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Emirikol Prime

Explorer
Mike Mearls "Invented The Baked Potato" in Xanathar's Guide With The Cleric Forge Domain

Other editions didn't give each domain a set of unique powers. IIRC it's always been some variety of spell list before 5e with maybe some weak feature.

2nd edition domains had worship rites and clothing and weapons etc. Let us not make excuses for a lack of content.

WotC aren't our friends. We are their customers.


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Ketser

First Post
Other editions had more than three times that.

3.0 and 3.5 domains were basically one shortly described ability + a list of additional spells, with a lot of them being redundant. It was bloody easy to just drop a bunch of them on a single page. 5e domains are actual subclasses, with actual features in addition to spells.
 

Emirikol Prime

Explorer
3.0 and 3.5 domains were basically one shortly described ability + a list of additional spells, with a lot of them being redundant. It was bloody easy to just drop a bunch of them on a single page. 5e domains are actual subclasses, with actual features in addition to spells.

Then they should have done the work. Let's not act like this is ditch digging. Far more should have been at launch especially considering their insane idea of content releases. Years later and we are finally getting some more.


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Tony Vargas

Legend
Other editions didn't give each domain a set of unique powers. IIRC it's always been some variety of spell list before 5e with maybe some weak feature.
In 2e they were called 'spheres,' rather than domains, and a CPH custom priesthood could have several depending on their combat abilities and how potent the 'granted power' they got might be. In 3e you only got 2 spheres and they were called 'domains,' in 5e you only get one. :shrug:
 

cbwjm

Seb-wejem
2nd edition domains had worship rites and clothing and weapons etc. Let us not make excuses for a lack of content.

WotC aren't our friends. We are their customers.


Sent from my iPhone using EN World mobile app
Not in the PHB. In the core rulebook they had the domains and they had the cleric and druid, each of which received a specific subset of spheres. The complete priest handbook expanded this by including sample priesthoods.

7 domains in the PHB is still plenty of content for the cleric, it clearly doesn't cover everything but then no PHB was fully comprehensive.
 

Panda-s1

Scruffy and Determined
2nd edition domains had worship rites and clothing and weapons etc. Let us not make excuses for a lack of content.

WotC aren't our friends. We are their customers.


Sent from my iPhone using EN World mobile app

Are you really gonna compare the elaborate supplementary stuff from 2nd edition to corebook material? Really? You know those aren't the same thing.


In 2e they were called 'spheres,' rather than domains, and a CPH custom priesthood could have several depending on their combat abilities and how potent the 'granted power' they got might be. In 3e you only got 2 spheres and they were called 'domains,' in 5e you only get one. :shrug:


Man I know what spheres and domains are, and I never really liked how vague 2nd edition was. I mean disclaimer my only real experience with playing AD&D was a short session that shot off an aborted campaign, but for that I made a cleric of Gond based on the entry from w/e supplement had FR clerics. That was awesome, but without supplements it felt weird, like choose some spheres based off your deity, also any special abilities, but I guess that was something you'd have to negotiate with your DM? As if your average DM will let you play a priest of Kegggstand the Poundinator and give your cleric abilities like being good at sex and drinking. Am I not understanding how that was supposed to work? Again it seemed pretty vague.
 

Henry

Autoexreginated
Then they should have done the work. Let's not act like this is ditch digging. Far more should have been at launch especially considering their insane idea of content releases. Years later and we are finally getting some more.

In my opinion that's being a bit harsh. First, it's not like it's been nothing since the game's release, there were domains released the following year with the Sword Coast guide, not to mention a bunch of Unearthed Arcana stuff for home table use. Secondly, the game is only three years old total, that's not that long actually, and it's only been the breakneck pace of stuff in 3.x and Pathfinder that gives people that expectation.

Do I wish there had been more content officially released in the past couple of years? Absolutely! But i'm not about to grill 'em for it, as they've still put out a decently supported game for three years, and despite my dislike of a very slow release schedule, they must be doing something right, because it's more popular than ever.
 


Valetudo

Adventurer
We're not even going to re-invent the wheel, this time, we're going all the way back to fire, and re-inventing things that people came up with in the early days of fire, before they had complicated things like wheels distracting them...

...the pre-pre-Columbian, pre-Incan people who discovered the potato, for instance, they had fire, but not the wheel, if they'd like, had the wheel, they might have skipped straight to tater tots...


...

Serioulsy, though, in 1e, there was a cryptic notation in the Dwarf class/level table that NPC dwarves could be clerics up to a not terribly high level. Elves, IIRC, got a similar notation, and halflings (maybe it was Druid). I guess it was because well, these other races had to have religion, but EGG didn't want them being PC clerics... OK.

Thing is, most of the races could be some kind of spellcaster, but not the Dwarf - Fighter, Fighter/Thief, that's about it. So who made those nifty Dwarven Throwers? Must've been those NPC clerics. Why not, clerics can use hammers. Yeah.

Just another case of mechanical artifacts shaping the poorly-sketched world(s) of early D&D.
Dwarves could be fighter/clerics.
 

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